Posts Tagged ‘os/2’

I’ve lived in New York City on two different occasions. First, while attending New York University in the mid-1980s, and a second time, from 1999-2001, while working for IBM.

Running with the gadget geeks at Consumer Electronics Show 2012? No thank you, says Turbo, who would much prefer to monitor the memes online from the safety of his mancave, where he runs little risk of being trampled on over cheap and unimaginative tchotchkes!

In neither instance did I ever visit the Statue of Liberty. I did take the Staten Island Ferry a couple of times, and we floated by Lady Liberty.

Does that count?

So it’s with some tremendous guilt that I admit I’ve also never attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the 2012 edition of which kicks off tomorrow.

It’s quite embarrassing as a self-admitted tech geek to make such an admission, but it’s the truth. I guess I’ve never had a really good business reason to attend, for one.

But I also get more than my fair share of time at trade shows and events, especially those for IBM, which anyone who’s a regular reader of this blog knows full well.

However, I also remember what it’s like to attend those big IT-related events in Las Vegas. For IBM’s Personal Systems magazine in 1994, I attended once, and only once, the massive COMDEX event.

IBM was prominently launching its new version of the OS/2 operating system that November 1994, “OS/2 Warp,” and I knew the moment I left McCarron Airport and saw the massive video screen featuring “OS/2 Warp” that I was in for a wild ride.

When I arrived at the Luxor hotel, where I was staying, and witnessed the room key cards and toilet banner wrap featuring “OS/2 Warp” — well, let’s just say that was as appropriate a way of prognosticating the fate of OS/2 as any I could think of, and it was only a short couple of years before CEO Lou Gerstner flushed the ill-fated operating system down its toilet of misery.

The feature piece I wrote about my experience at COMDEX was entitled “The Running of the Geeks.” And I can still remember the experience like it was yesterday.

Remembering this was during the days before ubiquitous cell phones and broadband Internet, this was still very much a face-to-face event. All the news was largely broken in company-initiated press conferences, and there was still plenty of buzz to be found on the massive show floor (think plural show floors, actually).

But what I also remember about COMDEX was how ridiculously crowded it was. For everything from making a pay phone call to grabbing a bite to eat for lunch to waiting for a cab, COMDEX was all about waiting in line. It was like trying to grab a loaf of bread in Moscow, pre-breakup of the USSR.

You had to wait in line for everything (including to take a bio break)! I joked at the time about how I was going to bring Roller Blades the next time I showed up for COMDEX, as that was the only sane way to get around.

Flash forward to 2012. I have friends who are attending the conference, poor suckers, and I feel for them. Because they, too, will be waiting — for everything. Because CES is pretty much on the same scale, only you also have the world’s most eager gadget hounds to fend off.

Not Turbo.

Here’s my CES strategy: Create a new dashboard on Netvibes using the keyword “CES,” then simply plan on following all the action remotely.

I can run downstairs from my home office and grab a cold beer if I need to (only after business hours, of course!). I can order a pizza and have it delivered straight to my man cave. Most importantly, I don’t have to worry about being stampeded as Intel rolls out its latest ultrabook line.

It’s perfectly fine by me if I never get to go to CES…

As for Lady Liberty, however, I still aspire to someday stand inside her crown.

Apps metrics provider Localytics shared a lengthy blog post earlier which suggested that plenty of good boys and girls around the globe got Apple iOS and Android devices in their stockings.

Their first hint? The number of new devices that appeared on Localytics dashboard was 12 times higher than previous weekends.

They also reported that there was some interesting geographical diversity, although the two platforms were mostly tied.

Apple took the top growth spurt for the U.S., Germany and the UK, while the ‘Droid grew the most in South Korea, Sweden, and Spain.

Source: Localytics. Among the top 20 countries for mobile devices, Localytics saw a huge increase in both Apple iOS and Android devices over the December 23 – 26 weekend compared to previous weekends since November 25. The US and Germany registered the highest growth rates for iOS, while South Korea and Sweden had the highest growth rates for Android.

I’ve believed (and even expressed) for some time this will be a largely two-horse horse race, and that Android will inevitably take victory.

But, the i-Juggernaut lingers on, both with the iPad and iPhone, and Google’s victory may not be as inevitable as it once seemed.

Of course, these are still early days, and if you’re looking for a deeper analysis of the mobile market, and also wondering why Windows Phone 7 isn’t one of those lead horses, check out Charlie Kindel’s analysis.

Having been at the scene of the Windows and OS/2 operating systems war crime, I would suggest you ought never rule Redmond out of the equation. All About Windows Phone just posted that the new Windows Phone Marketplace has now passed the 50,000 app mark, and is generating some 256 items per day.

That means the Windows Phone App pace has picked up some serious steam in recent weeks, and I suspect many of those Windows Phone Apps could fit elegantly into the Windows Azure and overall Microsoft cloud/desktop landscape, particularly with respect to a lot of business applications.

So, the net of it all is, the iPlatform enjoys continued momentum with some nice Christmas pick-up, but Android enjoys a device diversity that should keep it gaining mobile share for some time to come.

And Windows? Well, a lot of folks don’t do them yet on mobile devices…the key word being “yet.”

Yes, yes, I know, this as just east and north of here folks are worrying about the overtopping of the Mississippi River, the opposite problem.

But it’s been a crazy drought here in Texas, and although north Texas had garnered some rain the last few days, we were teased with droplets…until this morning. This morning it came falling from the heavens.

Let it rain.

Some clouds emerged over Facebook-land overnight as well as The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons pens a bombshell of a story explaining how the social network secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google and its privacy practices.

As we say here down south, well if that ain’t the pot callin’ the kettle black. Facebook hiring PR flack to denigrate Google over its poor privacy practices, particularly with its new Google Social Circle technology?

But Lyons digs deeper and suggests this is all about the data — namely, Google Social Circle pulling Facebook social graph data and repackaging it in Social Circle, much like it built Google News by repackaging news stories from hundreds of newspapers.

No, this is much, much more than about Internet privacy. Billions of online ad dollars are at stake in the Google v. Facebook juggernaut, and on the face of this story, Facebook seems destined to dig deep into Google’s social dirt instead of continuing to fight the good fight where it belongs, with its development teams.

What’s laughable, in this case, is that the Facebook Goliath blinked at David before he’d even had his slingshot loaded. Many have been waiting for a viable social play or layer on the Google portfolio, and have grown red in the face waiting for them to deliver.

Then, at the first mention of a Google “social” something being introduced into the market, Facebook does a full on PR freak and heads over the hills into Mountain View, full iPad guns a blazin’.

At a time when anyone in their right mind and who follows this space and uses these tools would acknowledge Facebook was well ahead in the social race. By a country mile. A full NYC marathon’s length, even.